Primary School 9/21
stuffing ballot boxes on video???
Results
Nashville: Voters delivered a smashing victory for progressives in the runoff election. Granted, progressive Freddie O’Connell’s victory over Republican Alice Rolli in the mayoral race was a foregone conclusion, but the at-large metro council runoffs were a different story. Liberal incumbent Zulfat “Z” Suara was the only candidate who did well enough in the first round to get elected without a runoff; eight candidates advanced to the runoff for four seats. All three progressives who advanced—District 34 councilor and Bernie Sanders campaign co-chair Delishia Porterfield, attorney and businesswoman Quin Evans-Segall, and union engineer Olivia Hill—won, along with moderate at-large incumbent councilor Burkley Allen. Nashville made history in multiple ways with this slate of at-large winners; all five are women, and Hill is the first openly transgender elected official in Tennessee history.
SC-SD-42’s special primary runoff ended in a recount; progressive state Rep. Wendell Gilliard trailed by 11 votes on election night, and a certified recount increased state Rep. Deon Tedder’s lead by a single vote.
CA-Sen
Badly lagging in fundraising and in the polls, Barbara Lee’s Senate campaign needs a boost. It got a minor one this week with the endorsement of Our Revolution, but also took a self-inflicted hit by picking a fight with Gavin Newsom—a move which cost Lee(‘s officially unaligned super PAC, wink wink) two top consultants who serve as advisers to the governor. Now, Lee’s got the most progressive record of anyone in this race, and Gov. Hair Gel is wildly overrated—what’s this fight about?
In an appearance on Meet the Press, Newsom said that in the event of Dianne Feinstein’s early departure from office, he would appoint someone who would serve as an interim senator and agree not to run. Normal enough, okay. This is a pretty normal thing for governors to do when faced with Senate vacancies shortly before elections: Deval Patrick’s appointment of Mo Cowan and Chris Christie’s appointment of Jeff Chiesa, both in 2013; Joe Manchin’s appointment of Carte Goodwin in 2010; Deval Patrick’s appointment of Paul Kirk, Charlie Crist’s appointment of George LeMieux, and Ruth Ann Minner’s appointment of Ted Kaufman, all in 2009—appointing an interim/caretaker senator to avoid giving any candidate the advantages of incumbency is quite normal. Newsom’s point that it would be unfair to Adam Schiff and Katie Porter to appoint their opponent to the Senate is, strictly speaking, correct. If Newsom didn’t hold this stance, we’d want him to appoint Lee, because if someone’s getting an unearned edge anyway we’d prefer it to be the most progressive candidate—but whatever Newsom’s motivations (more on that later), this stance is a fair one to hold. The electoral benefits of incumbency are quite significant, and democracies tend to require special elections instead of appointments for a reason. Lee’s complaint is that Newsom previously promised to appoint a Black woman in the event of a Senate vacancy, and it’s insulting to appoint a Black woman on the condition she doesn’t run—but Barbara Lee is not the only Black woman in California qualified to serve in the Senate, and we strongly doubt Newsom would appoint Schiff or Porter in the event he had never promised to appoint a Black woman. Why? Well, we don’t believe Newsom’s explanation for why he’s not appointing an interim senator—because there’s a more obvious one. House Republicans have a majority slim enough that a unified Democratic caucus can hold up their agenda from time to time; appointing any of the three leading candidates would leave Democrats down a vote, guaranteeing an infuriated phone call to the governor’s mansion from Nancy Pelosi at minimum. Newsom had no problem appointing Alex Padilla to succeed Kamala Harris in 2021 even though that gave Padilla a massive advantage in 2022, because Alex Padilla was the California Secretary of State at the time of his appointment. He wasn’t part of Democrats’ House math, so there was zero cost in appointing him. Appointing any of the current candidates for this Senate seat creates an instant headache for congressional Democrats (and scrambles the election for the appointee’s House seat by throwing a midyear special election into the equation.) Simply put, Lee’s argument is desperate, cynical, and most of all—wrong.
DE-AL
A poll from Change Research sponsored by the Human Rights Campaign finds state Sen. Sarah McBride (who HRC is supporting) leading with a commanding 44% of the vote in the state’s open congressional primary. Delaware State Housing Authority Director Eugene Young has 23%, and state Treasurer Colleen Davis has 13%.
MD-Sen
Rep. David Trone's campaign has been in obvious trouble for several months as Maryland Democrats coalesce around Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks. Recently, Trone decided to respond to this by rebranding himself as a progressive, as outlined by Josh Kurtz at Maryland Matters. The multimillionaire liquor chain owner has recently taken to calling himself a "change agent" and "a very progressive Democrat", something he seems willing to argue people don't believe about him because of his race and not because of his voting record and public statements. As much as our philosophy is usually that in a race between two moderates, the candidate who tries to appeal to progressives is the better pick, a member of the New Democrats who openly hates Medicare for All is straining credulity far too much about how sincere he could be about any of this. That is to say: he's plainly not sincere about any of this, and even he seems to think it's a hard brand pivot to buy, considering that the other theme he's leaning on now is bipartisanship.
MD-06
The field of candidates vying to succeed David Trone continues to grow, as Commerce Department official April McClain-Delaney officially departed from the Biden administration in advance of an expected campaign. McClain-Delaney’s husband, 2020 joke presidential candidate John Delaney, represented this district from 2013 to 2019, at which point he was succeeded by Trone. McClain-Delaney will not want for connections, name recognition, or cash—like David Trone, John Delaney is a fabulously wealthy businessman who paid for much of his campaign expenses out of his own pocket, and if anyone has access to the Delaney fortune other than John, it’s his wife. McClain-Delaney may have Trone on her side (or we may be reading between the lines a little too much): Trone, when asked about MD-06 in the aforementioned Maryland Matters interview, said “I think we’ve got to find the right candidate. I think it would be great if it was a woman [...] We’re sort of still looking around. Hopefully the right candidate will come forward.”
At the time Trone gave that interview, Del. Lesley Lopez, Hagerstown Mayor Tekesha Martinez, and Montgomery County Councilor Laurie-Anne Sayles had already announced campaigns. Martinez and Sayles are positioning themselves as progressives, not a natural fit for Trone’s irritating moderation, but Lopez’s policy positions and rhetoric are darn close to Generic Democrat; overlooking her (and Del. Joe Vogel, who is not a woman but is positioning himself as the most centrist candidate) speaks volumes to us.
MI-13
Shri Thanedar bought his way into Congress in 2022 the same way he bought his way into the Michigan state House in 2020: blanketing the district with enough money to win a low plurality in a badly split field of candidates. At least two of the opponents he defeated in 2022 are looking for rematches. One, John Conyers III, has been running Do You Know Who My Father Is? campaigns since his father first left Congress in 2018 (amid numerous sexual harassment allegations) and has failed to gain traction with any of them; in 2022, he placed a distant fourth with 8% of the vote. The other, Adam Hollier, is a more credible threat to Thanedar: Hollier, then a state senator from Detroit, placed second in the 2022 primary and has since moved on to a new job as Director of the Michigan Veterans Affairs Agency. In 2022, Hollier was the preferred candidate of AIPAC, which spent handsomely on his campaign, so our expectations aren’t high; however, Thanedar has embraced the AIPAC line on foreign policy since winning, additionally cozying up to India’s right-wing, Islamophobic, authoritarian PM Narendra Modi, who made his name as a Hindu nationalist icon by obstructing efforts to secure justice in the wake of anti-Muslim massacres fueled by his political party, the BJP, in Gujarat while serving as the Indian state’s Chief Minister. (Incidentally, Thanedar’s district has a large Muslim population.) Conyers is already scheduling fundraisers and Hollier is staffing up, so both men seem pretty set on challenging Thanedar.
PA-12/NY-16/MN-05
Roughly a month ago, Jewish Insider’s Matthew Kassel wrote about AIPAC’s efforts to find challengers to three Black Squad members. At the time, AIPAC was telegraphing confidence about all three, with strong candidates reportedly leaning towards challenging Ilhan Omar and Jamaal Bowman. Discussions about a challenger to AIPAC’s third target, Summer Lee, were in their earlier stages, but Lee is newer to Congress than Omar and Bowman, and her primary victory was narrower than even Omar’s 2022 nailbiter.
A month later, Lee seems to have moved to the top of AIPAC’s list, as attempts to recruit candidates to challenge other Squad members have seemingly fizzled thus far; Westchester County Executive George Latimer has deferred making a decision on a Bowman challenge and is now seen as unlikely to go for it by local politicos, and it’s a similar story for Minneapolis City Councilor LaTrisha Vetaw’s potential challenge to Ilhan Omar. AIPAC has a silver lining, in that it appears as though they’ve found someone to take on Lee—Edgewood (pop 3,000) Councilmember Bhavini Patel. Patel briefly ran for this seat in 2022 but dropped out in the spring after it became clear she had no hope. Patel’s launch is said to be some time in October, placing it at least four weeks after Lee’s reelection launch, which was clearly planned with a primary in mind; while many safe seat Dems will announce reelection with a press release or small press conference at most, Lee’s launch host committee included both of Pennsylvania’s senators, and her fundraising pitch to small donors was “[j]ust like last time, we need your help *early* to beat back the racist attacks from their billionaire donors + corporate PACs.”
RI-Gov
Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha has previously batted aside speculation that he might be interested in running for governor. Now, as he settles into his second and final term as AG, he’s sounding more and more like the common epithet for state AGs: Aspiring Governor. To his credit, he doesn’t deny or deflect; when WPRI’s Ted Nesi asked Neronha whether his thinking had changed, and if he had developed an interest in running for governor, Neronha’s answer was simple: yes. Neronha has kept an active schedule of political events since winning his second term, and has been increasingly willing to level criticism at other Democrats in state government; in the interview where he finally admitted his thinking had changed, Neronha discussed at length with Nesi what he perceives as lackluster performance at state agencies (presumably not including the one that he runs.) Neronha could find himself on a collision course with Gov. Dan McKee, who limped through the Democratic primary last year with less than a third of the vote; McKee won’t be bound by term limits until 2030, because the partial term he served after his ascension from the lieutenant governorship isn’t counted towards the two-term limit. Former CVS executive Helena Buonanno Foulkes, who nearly defeated McKee last year, is also looking to make a second bid for governor. Neronha is an outspoken liberal, better than we can say of McKee—a moderate and erstwhile social conservative—or Foulkes, who has the business-friendly centrist politics and bipartisan donation history you would expect of a politically minded CVS executive.
TX-18
In only a few days after launching a campaign so vapid he deleted his policy platform hours after his launch, Isaiah Martin raised an absolute truckload of money. In his first 24 hours, he pulled in $130,000; a week later, he’d added another $100,000 to that total. Even if his fundraising slows to a trickle soon, a frugal campaign could last a while on $230,000. (Just good luck affording TV ads in the uber-expensive Houston media market.)
TX-32
State Rep. Rhetta Bowers, a member of the 2018 class of swing seat Democratic freshmen, seemed interested in this seat after Rep. Colin Allred began his Senate campaign, but by early June had seemingly weighed the risks and decided her newly blue house district was too good to leave behind. It surprised a great number of people when she suddenly reversed course this week and entered the Congressional race after all. Aside from Bowers, the field currently consists of centrist state Rep. Julie Johnson, disgraced former Dallas Councilmember Kevin Felder, doctor Brian Williams, civil rights attorney Justin Moore, and several others. Bowers’s entry comes at a time with no clearly progressive candidate in the top tier of candidates, and no consensus candidate among Black political leaders for a district where Black voters make a substantial portion of the electorate, but far from a majority. Bowers is aiming to fill both those roles, pitching herself as able to deliver “progressive change we need” in her campaign launch, and nailing down the endorsement of ten Black and Hispanic Texas politicians before launching, including former Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson.
Whether Bowers can actually lay claim to the progressive mantle in this race is unclear, and her willingness to tout the support of Rep. Harold Dutton Jr. suggests she won’t be leaning too hard into appealing to progressives, but her voting record is solid, and if it comes down to her and Johnson in the runoff, it’s hard to imagine progressives supporting the Bloomberg endorser. Perhaps more salient to Texas voters is Johnson’s willingness to restore the quorum in the State House in 2021, breaking the only point of leverage Democrats had to stop the GOP’s gerrymandering and major changes to election law. Bowers alluded to the saga in her launch video, and Johnson hit back hard—aiming her fire, oddly, at how little money Bowers has in her (state) campaign account, proving, according to her, that she is “still the candidate with the best ability to raise and deploy the necessary funds to ensure Democrats hold this seat.” (The money in Bowers’s state account isn’t even transferrable to a federal campaign account, by the way.)
Joe Biden got more than twice as many votes as Donald Trump in this district. We’re sure that someone will top this statement at some point in this cycle—we’re not even at the point where candidates are getting desperate—but as of right now, Julie Johnson has indicated more directly than any other Democrat running that she thinks Democratic voters are idiots.
VA-10
Rep. Jennifer Wexton announced this week that she will be retiring after finishing out the current term in the House, her third, instead of running for reelection. Her decision was prompted by a diagnosis of progressive supranuclear palsy, a degenerative neurological condition with no cure and a dismal prognosis for treatment. While this news does mean another Democratic-leaning district will be open in 2024, we suspect basic sensitivity will dictate that no news about who is going to run for it will bubble up for a few weeks. We wish Rep. Wexton the best.
Boston City Council
While some Boston progressives are still having a pity party about the losses of two scandal-plagued city councilors in last week’s preliminary round, others are beginning to get real about November. In Districts 5 and 6, the top vote-getters were still broadly friendly to Mayor Michelle Wu and the policies of the city council’s progressive faction while the second-place finishers were clearly aligned with moderates and conservatives. The Boston Teachers Union endorsed Wu aide Enrique Pepén in District 5, and progressive state Rep. Sam Montaño endorsed workers’ rights lawyer Ben Weber in District 6.
Bridgeport Mayor
Joe Ganim’s second straight improbable victory in absentee ballots immediately faced the same suspicions of fraud as his last victory. The mayor and convicted felon’s last primary campaign’s absentee ballot operation was shady enough that state investigators eventually recommended criminal charges against three campaign workers, but this campaign is falling apart much faster—because challenger John Gomes’s campaign got its hands on surveillance footage of someone who appears to be a Ganim employee literally stuffing stacks of absentee ballots into a drop box. Gomes’s campaign is challenging the primary results in court, Bridgeport police are now investigating, and a parallel state investigation seems likely. Gomes is also challenging Ganim in November on a third-party ballot line.
Philadelphia City Council
The Working Families Party’s efforts to take Republicans’ seats on the Philadelphia City Council scored a major coup this week: John Fetterman endorsed both of the WFP’s council candidates, incumbent Kendra Brooks and challenger Nicolas O’Rourke. Philadelphia elects seven at-large city councilors, but voters may only vote for five and parties may nominate a maximum of five candidates—guaranteeing that two councilors at-large will not be members of the majority party. Getting the pair elected will require convincing Democratic voters to split their tickets tactically, and endorsements from high-profile Democrats like Fetterman and Gov. Josh Shapiro, who endorsed Brooks last week, will go a long way towards convincing party regulars to buck the Philly Democratic machine’s opposition to the WFP. For progressive voters, electing Brooks and O’Rourke is just about the cleanest win-win imaginable: out with the GOP, in with labor-backed leftists who don’t answer to the Democratic establishment. And for more partisan Democrats, hey, it’s a chance to make Republicans lose even more power.